Green Up Your Thumb, part 2

So, let's say you've chosen the location for your flower bed--or it's been chosen for you courtesy of the previous owners of your home, or through the vagaries of temperamental grass that refuses to grow in that one shady spot, or whatever. And you've done a little observing of the soil, water, sun/shade, so that you have some idea of the parameters you're working with. And you've read some gardening books (or at the very least enjoyed a cup of coffee while admiring all the pretty pictures). And now Saturday is coming up, and you're all excited to go buy some plants.

Where do you go to spend that money? How do you choose which plants to buy? And how many? And of what size? Here are some things to keep in mind when answering those questions.

Where to Go
There are basically three types of places to buy plants: dedicated nurseries, garden centers that are part of big-box stores, and online. I buy most of my plants at Home Depot's garden center for two reasons: (1) I'm incredibly lazy, and Home Depot happens to be 1/2 a mile from my house, whereas all the nurseries are miles away; (2) I'm pretty cheap, and since most of what I buy is an experiment (it might thrive, or I might kill it deader than dead in a single season), I prefer to buy the more inexpensive versions.

It's no secret that big-box stores sell plants for much less than do nurseries. The internet is even cheaper. In general, here is the difference in quality for common plants at these three places: nothing. If you want to buy plants that are of your everyday garden variety, generally easy to grow and hardy in your area, and of a decent size, a big-box garden center is your place.

If you want specialty plants, shrubs (which are far more expensive than flowering plants), or young trees that are bigger than your Kindergartener, then go to a nursery. Why? First, because a nursery will have a big staff to help you choose. If you include the cost of killed-through-incompetence plants in your overall assessment of how much it costs to fill your beds, then a nursery can be a real boon. For example, a nursery staffer would have pointed me to willow bushes, which I didn't know existed, and steered me away from forsythia when I said I wanted something to plant in a very very wet spot, thereby saving me at least $40 in dead forsythia. Although you'll spend more per plant, you'll be far less likely to make a costly mistake such as purchasing precisely the wrong shrubs for your spot. Second, many nurseries have guarantees, so that if the things die within a year, they'll replace them for free. I still don't use nurseries for my general bedding flowers, though, because I find they are twice the price as the same plants at Home Depot, and I don't need that kind of security for a $3 plant (make that $6 at the nursery).

Plants online are generally the cheapest of all, but in many cases it's a false economy. Sure, you may get a dozen bleeding hearts for $8, but when they arrive, you will find that each plant is the size of your thumb. It's far better to spend $10 at a big-box gardening center, buying three lush plants that will flower this year and make your garden already look a bit filled up. On the other hand, I use online gardening supply centers for things like bulbs, which only come in one size anyway, since there is a far greater selection online than I can find at any local supplier, and the prices can't be beat.

How to Choose
I'll assume you will be choosing plants that suit the sun/shade requirements of your spot, which is the most important consideration for keeping them happy and healthy. But some plants are more finicky than others, and there are some important things to consider when making your choices.

For the most failsafe gardening, choose indigenous plants, or ones that naturalize easily in your area. Naturalize is a fancy way of saying they'll grow wild in the woods, or along streams, or in the ditch by the railroad tracks, if someone accidentally drops them there and no human ever does another thing to help them along. They'll be hardy, and they'll reproduce quickly and with minimal effort on your part (like my Lily of the Valley, to the left). The easiest way to find out what these are is to buy a Field Guide to your area -- you know, one of those books designed to help you identify plants on your nature walks. That will show you pictures of all sorts of things that thrive in the local soil. (Be careful, though, not to choose things that are just fancy weeds -- such as Queen Anne's Lace -- or you'll never have another thing in your garden again because they'll go so crazy reproducing. If you stick with things you can buy rather than things you actually dig up in the woods, you should be fine.) If that's too high maintenance for you, then at least use this link to look up your gardening zone, if you are planning to shop online. (Anything sold at your local gardening store will theoretically grow in your area, as long as you pay attention to its water/sun requirements.)

When selecting plants to put together in one bed, aim for continuous interest. Look at the little tags in the pots to see what the stated bloom time is. This is important because although many things you buy in a big-box store will be forced (have their timing tinkered with so that they'll be blooming when you're shopping), if you buy perennials, they will revert to their natural cycles once they are in a real outdoor climate rather than a greenhouse. "Aim for continuous interest" means choose some things that will bloom in early spring, others in late spring, some that bloom in summer, others in early fall.


In the picture above, for example, you can see that the pink Bleeding Hearts have prominence in this bed right now, and the little Sweet Woodruff (white flowers) and Forget-Me-Nots (blue) form a carpet under them. The Sweet Woodruff blooms almost all summer, so it makes a lovely border for this shady bed. The Forget-Me-Nots will last till mid-summer, then just be foliage. The Bleeding Heart will die back completely by mid to late summer. But by the time they do, the broad leaves you can just see in the background on the right will have grown into mature and very large Plantain Lilies. These in fact fill up the entire back half of the bed, and a few are planted very close to the Bleeding Heart in the foreground. That way, once the early plants begin to die back, the later plants are springing up. In late summer, as the front of this bed begins to look a bit thin, the rear of this bed has two-foot-high stalks of giant trumpet shaped white flowers...so you don't even notice that the earlier plants are gone. (And, by the way, I only figured out what bloomed when and died back when after about five years of gardening in this particular house, so don't assume you'll get that just right immediately. It's an experiment. But it is something worth keeping in mind as you're buying. Even though it all depends on whether the rabbits eat up every single shoot the minute it bursts forth or not, anyway.)

Perennials or Annuals? The Big Debate
I spend nearly all of my planting money on perennials, which I think of as plants designed for long-term gratification. It's okay to buy them fairly small, since each year they'll get bigger and better. To the right, for example, are two shots taken of the same plant (can't recall its name). I planted the lower one a year ago as a little bitty thing (the size that comes in those little plant six-packs). I took these photos from the same vantage point, so you could have a clear sense of the difference in scale. The bottom one has not only grown tremendously; it's also spawned offshoots including the one above. I planted six of these; only three survived, but there are already two new plants -- and the whole batch cost me about $3. Clearly, this will be a good ground-cover for this shady spot within another year.

One important thing to know about perennials is that many of them will not flower the first year, as they are busy building root structures and gathering strength. Also, since they can increase dramatically in size over time, you have to space them a bit further apart to give them room to grow -- or you have to be prepared to divide them up once they do get too crowded.

This is where annuals are useful. If you buy 2/3 or 3/4 perennials and 1/4 to 1/3 annuals in your first year, you can fill out the bed with faster-growing, fully flowering annuals to give some time for the perennials to take hold. If you are going to do this, intersperse them, so that next year, you can put new perennials in the empty spaces left by the annuals. Keep in mind, if you find a perennial in a gardening book, but that plant is not hardy (meaning it won't make it through the winter/summer) in your zone, you may still be able to use that plant as an annual. Snapdragons, for example, are perennial down South, but work just beautifully as a summer annual here in Michigan.

Don't be afraid of bulbs. Perhaps the most gratifying thing to plant is bulbs. Why? Because you put them in during the late fall, when all your other gardening tasks are about pruning and watching the leaves come down, and then they sit there working their magic over winter, and suddenly one day you wake up to glowing puddles of fabulous Crocus welcoming the springtime. Glorious. They are exceedingly easy to plant, especially if you get one of those little hand-held bulb planting gizmos which looks like a slighly cone-shaped tub with a handle across the top; you poke it down into the soil, and remove a plug, drop the bulb in, and then replace the soil. Easy as pie. (Hard to describe -- ask the folks at the garden center to show you.) Keep in mind that each bulb will produce one plant, which may mean one flower or multiples, depending on the plant. For the best impact, you should buy at least a handful of the same bulb and plant them close together. I flaunt the spacing directions for bulbs all the time. I dug big holes and put 20 or so daffodil bulbs in each when I was transplanting mine. The impact is much greater. Just don't crowd the bulbs in the hole -- leave at least an inch or two of space between each one -- and be very careful about how deep you plant them. Too much soil above them and they won't flower; too little, and they may dry out or freeze to death in winter, literally.

As for what specific plants you choose: pick the things you like. Choose color combinations that make you happy. Buy enough plants to form pleasant little groups, but don't feel the need to fill every square inch of the bed right away. Part of the fun of gardening is its continuousness. You put in a few plants, see how they go, add others to complement, move some around, add again, rearrange, till you get it the way you like it.

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For the rest of the Green Up Your Thumb series, see here:
Part 1: Planning and Assessing the Flower Bed Site
And coming on subsequent Fridays
Part 3: Laying out Flower Beds
Part 4: Ideas for Gardening in the Shade
Part 5: Maintenance